Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 15.
(refine search)
Conference Paper
Relative prices and relative prosperity
The positive correlation between PPP investment rates and PPP income levels across countries is one of the most robust findings of the empirical growth literature. We show that this relationship is almost entirely driven by differences in the price of investment relative to output across countries. When measured at domestic prices rather than at international prices, investment rates are little correlated with PPP incomes. We find that the high relative price of investment in poor countries is solely due to the low price of consumption goods in poor countries. Investment prices are no higher ...
Working Paper
A Theory of Falling Growth and Rising Rents
Growth has fallen in the U.S. amid a rise in firm concentration. Market share has shifted to low labor share firms, while within-firm labor shares have actually risen. We propose a theory linking these trends in which the driving force is falling overhead costs of spanning multiple products or a rising efficiency advantage of large firms. In response, the most efficient firms (with higher markups) spread into new product lines, thereby increasing concentration and generating a temporary burst of growth. Eventually, due to greater competition from efficient firms, within-firm markups and ...
Working Paper
Missing Growth from Creative Destruction
Statistical agencies typically impute inflation for disappearing products from the inflation rate for surviving products. As some products disappear precisely because they are displaced by better products, inflation may be lower at these points than for surviving products. As a result, creative destruction may result in overstated inflation and understated growth. We use a simple model to relate this ?missing growth? to the frequency and size of various kinds of innovations. Using U.S. Census data, we then apply two ways of assessing the magnitude of missing growth for all private nonfarm ...
Working Paper
Innovative Growth Accounting
Recent work highlights a falling entry rate of new firms and a rising market share of large firms in the United States. To understand how these changing firm demographics have affected growth, we decompose productivity growth into the firms doing the innovating. We trace how much each firm innovates by the rate at which it opens and closes plants, the market share of those plants, and how fast its surviving plants grow. Using data on all nonfarm businesses from 1982-2013, we find that new and young firms (ages Oto 5 years) account for almost one-half of growth- three times their share of ...
Journal Article
Sticky prices and monetary policy shocks
Models with sticky prices predict that monetary policy changes will affect relative prices and relative quantities in the short run because some prices are more flexible than others. In U.S. micro data, the degree of price stickiness differs dramatically across consumption categories. This study exploits that diversity to ask whether popular measures of monetary shocks (for example, innovations in the federal funds rate) have the predicted effects. The study finds that they do not. Short-run responses of relative prices have the wrong sign. And monetary policy shocks seem to have persistent ...
Journal Article
Missing Growth from Creative Destruction
When products disappear from the market with no substitutes from the same manufacturer, they may have been replaced by cheaper or better products from a different manufacturer. Official measurements typically approximate price changes from such creative destruction using price changes for products that were not replaced. This can lead to overstating inflation and, in turn, understating economic growth. A recent estimate suggests that around 0.6 percentage point of growth is missed per year. The bias has not increased over time, however, so it does not explain the slowdown in productivity ...
Working Paper
Sticky information and sticky prices
In the U.S. and Europe, prices change somewhere between every six months and once a year. Yet nominal macro shocks seem to have real effects lasting well beyond a year. "Sticky information" models, as posited by Sims (2003), Woodford (2003), and Mankiw and Reis (2002), can reconcile micro flexibility with macro rigidity. We simulate a sticky information model in which price setters do not update their information on macro shocks as often as they update their information on micro shocks. Compared to a standard menu cost model, price changes in this model reflect older macro shocks. We then ...
Working Paper
Reset price inflation and the impact of monetary policy shocks
A standard state-dependent pricing model implies very limited scope for using active monetary policy to stabilize real activity. Two modeling strategies which expand the role of monetary policy are time-dependent pricing and strategic complementarities between price-setting firms. These mechanisms have telltale implications for the persistence and volatility of "reset price inflation." Reset price inflation is the rate of change of all desired prices (including for goods that have not changed price in the current period). Using the micro data underpinning the CPI, we construct an empirical ...